Surveyors meet in Cape Town

The 2015 annual meeting of the International Social Survey Programme (www.issp.org), held on April 25-29 in Cape Town, South Africa, marked a quarter-century of Social Weather Stations as the Philippine member of this best-quality cross-country survey network.

It was in 1990, in the city of Graz, Austria, that SWS joined ISSP, as its 12th member overall, and its first from the developing world. SWS did its first ISSP survey in 1991—the topic was religion—and all rounds thereafter, for 24 surveys thus far that enable scientific comparison of Filipinos with other nationalities. The ISSP network now has 48 countries, but only one from Asean.

ISSP is a self-governing—one country, one vote—and self-financed network of institutions that do a nationally-representative survey of adults each year, on a commonly-agreed topic, with a jointly-designed questionnaire, and then deposit their data in an archive open to public use. The payoff from the effort to do one’s own survey is the full access to the data of all the members. The minimum sample is 1,000, the global standard for any nation, large or small.

South Africa. The 2015 ISSP meeting was hosted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the South African member, based in Pretoria. By tradition, Saturday is a day for touring, Sunday is for presenting research, and Monday to Wednesday are for arranging forthcoming surveys.

On Saturday morning, we visited Robben Island, in Table Bay, seven kilometers off Cape Town, where Nelson Mandela spent 17 of his 28 years of imprisonment by the apartheid regime. Robben was for blacks only; white subversives were put elsewhere. This very bleak, lonely, rocky place is now a tourist attraction. Tata (“Father”) Mandela’s two-meter-square solitary cell has a metal plate, a wooden bucket, and a sleeping roll. The tourist guide, an ex-prisoner, tells us the key word: forgiveness.

We spent the afternoon at the Groot Constantia Estate, a high-end vineyard. Here the HSRC and the Department of Science and Technology held a seminar where academics talked on “The role of government in an unequal world,” and black poet Diane Ferrus read her poetry, while we tasted two reds, a white, and an interesting rosé called blanc de noir.

The seminar opened our eyes to South Africa’s being a very young democracy. It was not free 60 years ago, when the African National Congress (ANC) adopted The Freedom Charter (June 26, 1955): “We the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white …”

It took fully 39 years after the Freedom Charter for freedom to arrive. South Africa marks April 27, 1994, only 21 years ago, as the date when its democracy truly began: This is Freedom Day—when South African blacks (80 percent of the population) exercised their vote, put the ANC into power, and made Nelson Mandela their first black president. (South Africa does not have an “Independence Day.” Its other notable holidays are Human Rights Day (March 21), Youth Day (June 16), National Women’s Day (Aug. 9), Heritage Day (Sept. 24), and Day of Reconciliation (Dec. 16).

Research session. The ISSP meeting is primarily for discussion of the collection of data, yet allots time for some presentations of analysis. In Cape Town, Mae Labucay of SWS spoke on “Receptivity to immigrants: comparing attitudes in net positive [i.e., receiving] and net negative [i.e., sending] migration countries,” using past ISSP surveys. But no one needs permission to use ISSP data; it is free.

The meeting proper. The Cape Town meeting was attended by 36 members. This is a matter of affordability, since each pays its own way. To be in good standing, a member should not fail to do two consecutive surveys, or fail to attend two consecutive annual meetings. SWS has done all the surveys since 1991, and has always attended, except in case of conflict with a Philippine national election, when our staff is overly busy.

The ISSP surveys follow a three-year assembly line. In Cape Town, we finalized the questionnaire for a survey on Role of Government, to be fielded in 2016, by voting on each and every item prepared by a drafting group that had been elected in 2013, and had submitted a first draft in 2014. We assessed the first draft of a survey questionnaire on Social Networks and Social Resources, set to be fielded in 2017; we expect the second draft in 2016. We voted for Religion as the survey topic for 2018, and elected its drafting group (Czech Republic, India, Norway, Turkey, the United States and Venezuela).

The governing board of the ISSP is its Standing Committee, consisting of the secretariat-country ex-officio, and four other countries elected for staggered three-year terms. The Philippines completed its 2013-2015 term in Cape Town; Israel, the outgoing secretariat, was elected to fill the vacancy.

The secretariat is held by a country elected for three years, with one reelection allowed. Israel completed its second term in Cape Town; Germany was unanimously elected as successor.

The next annual meeting of ISSP will be in late April 2016, in Kaunas, the second largest city of Lithuania; it will be hosted by the Kaunas University of Technology. The succeeding venues will be Turkey in 2017, probably Mexico in 2018, and possibly India in 2019. There is no shortage of countries eager to host the ISSP meeting. (The Philippines hosted the ISSP in Manila in 1998, in line with our Independence Centennial.)

* * *

Contact mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph